Progress Report: April 2024

Another full month here at Backpack. Let's dig into it: Support It's been a busy month for Jorge and Karan, but they've handled it like...

Another full month here at Backpack. Let's dig into it:

Support

It's been a busy month for Jorge and Karan, but they've handled it like pros. We have been getting more non-Backpack and "how do I do X" discussions in our community forum. On one hand, it's great to see activity there. On the other hand, every issue that we answer is at the detriment of fixing a bug, so it would be great to have more help from the community in answering opinions and how-tos. If anybody likes to do that, please pitch in - it's a great way to stand out, show you care, help out people just like you and test your skills. People often find different solutions to the same problem, and it's interesting to see what other would do in the same situation. I got schooled so many times, by people finding simpler solutions - I love it.

Maintenance

This month, Pedro has been steadily crushing 🪲 and making the codebase more solid:

• CRUD - 16 bug fixes
• PRO - 3 bug fixes
• Theme-Tabler - 3 bug fixes
• Generators - 1 bug fix
• a few other fixes to our other free packages

New Features

New field: select2_json_from_API

Antonio and Pedro have pushed an advanced feature in Backpack PRO, that has been asked for a while now. We're very happy to have an easy solution for this advanced use case! In complex admin panels, it's often happened to us (and to our users) to need a select element with options... from an external API. For example... "select an issue from the Github API" or "select an email from the Gmail API". What would you do?

• If you had 100 entries - easy - you could use the select2 field.
• If you had 10.000, 100.000 or 1.000.000 of records... bummer. You needed efficient querying, pagination, etc. You needed to roll your own select2_from_ajax field, basically. Still possible to do (isn't Backpack great)... but it would probably take you a few hours to do it.

Now, thanks to the new select2_json_from_API field they have created, you can do all of that within minutes. The field takes its options from a PHP endpoint in the app... that you have FULL control over. This means:

• you can completely customize the API settings, according to your needs;
• you can cache results (if needed, to prevent heavy API usage);
• you can paginate, change, parse results any way you want them;

It really think it's a simple solution to a complex problem - I think you'll love it too. Check out:

• the docs for the select2_json_from_api field for more info;
• the field in action in our demo;

New Features Going Forward

Heads-up - we're getting closer to the point where we can no longer push new features every month. The next features & packages we have in the pipeline will take considerably more time to create, so it's possible that you'll only be seeing new features every 2-3 months. But that also means when they come... they will be BIG features, solving BIG problems 😄 Can't wait!

New Content

In addition to helping Jorge with support... Karan has also been posting helpful content on our blog and Twitter. Here's what's new since last month:

• Language switcher UI for your Laravel App
• New Addon: Edit Laravel Translations from Your Admin Panel
• Generate a Laravel CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) in 5 minutes
• Top 10 Laravel Collection Methods You Have Never Used

If you haven't already, subscribe to our blog article digest to get these articles as soon as they're out. We also post PHP, Laravel and Backpack tips on Twitter.

We're also accepting guest posts. So if you've got anything Backpack or Laravel-related to show our community, send us an email with your idea, happy to see if it's something we can include.

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Thanks for using Backpack. We love doing this for you.

Cheers!